Eric Sloof

VMware has released the beta of a new training course called VMware vCloud: Architecting the VMware Cloud. This course is designed to guide students through the decision points and policy choices available for designing and implementing a VMware vCloud environment. Students will learn to appreciate the effects of design choices in VMware vSphere 4, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter™ Chargeback, and the VMware vShield Edge functionality that is included with vCloud Director. The course culminates in a comprehensive workshop about VMware cloud design.

PortBox PL: Serial to Ethernet device server

RS-232/485 serial line - Ethernet converter on TCP/IP and UDP/IP protocol. Built-in virtual serial port support, the remote port can be mapped as for example COM1 in VM using the HW VSP utility. 9-bit support extension, wide support of RS-485 question-answer communication support.A typical application is access a remote technology controlled over RS-232 of RS-485, or serial port prolonging via the Ethernet network.

http://www.hw-group.com/products/converter/index_en.html

Moxa NPort 5100A

The NPort 5100A device servers are designed to make serial devices network-ready in an instant and give your VM direct access to serial devices. The NPort 5100A device servers are ultra lean, ruggedized, and user friendly, making simple and reliable serial to Ethernet solutions possible.

http://www.moxa.com/product/NPort_5100A.htm

At the VMworld 2010 Krishna Raj Raja and Haiping Yang have delivered a great session called Troubleshooting using ESXTOP for Advanced Users (TA6720). This session contains the new esxtop features which can be found in ESX 4.1. One of the new metrics is RESV/s (SCSI reservations per second). Duncan Epping has also written an article about it called Did you know? SCSI Reservations

VMFS is a clustered file system and uses SCSI reservations as part of its distributed locking algorithms. Administrative operations, such as creating or deleting a virtual disk, extending a VMFS volume, or creating or deleting snapshots, result in metadata updates to the file system using locks, and thus result in SCSI reservations.

Reservations are also generated when you expand a virtual disk for a virtual machine with a snapshot. A reservation causes the LUN to be available exclusively to a single ESX host for a brief period of time. Although it is acceptable practice to perform a limited number of administrative tasks during peak hours, it is preferable to postpone major maintenance or configuration tasks to off‐peak hours in order to minimize the impact on virtual machine performance.

In this video I’ll show you the new SCSI Reservation stats and the impact on the storage performance when the number if SCSI reservations becomes too high.

The information in this video is not completely correct, you can listen for an explanation in the VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast number 118 with Krishna Raj Raja.

Art Berman, CEO over at StarWind has some exiting offers for VMware certified professionals, including the opportunity to be a guest speaker in one of their weekly iSCSI SAN webinars (where you can pick the topic) and to earn referral cash rewards. StarWind Software supports the community of Microsoft & VMware certified professionals by providing free NFR (not for resale) licenses of StarWind iSCSI SAN software to individuals with an MCP/MVP/VCP status.

As a guest speaker, you can talk about any topic related to iSCSI and StarWind SAN products, such as virtual servers & server management, desktop virtualization, disaster recovery, backups, etc., the limit is your imagination. They can arrange a live webinar or recorded webcast - whatever you prefer. Take a look at some of their previous webinars prepared by your fellow IT professionals. I’ve recently recorded a video for StarWind regarding "StarWind iSCSI multipathing with Round Robin and esxcli".

This webcast covers the benefits and features of StarWind iSCSI multipathing with Round Robin and esxcli. It also explains the operations you need to complete to create and format the datastore in the way your ESX server can create virtual machines on it and show how the esxcli command can be used for PSA (pluggable storage architecture) management and explain how to use the vSphere Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug-in (NMP).

As an MCP/MVP/VCP you probably requested your free NFR key to give demos to your customers and colleagues or for educational use. Some of your students, colleagues or event attendees may be keen to order commercial version of our products.You can earn up to 25% off MSRP for any deal you bring StarWind - all deals are registered to your name, protecting you for your efforts. Please contact their sales department to learn how you can earn from your hard work already invested with StarWind's iSCSI SAN software.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/offers-for-professionals-newsletter

Flex is already in use in two VMware applications in the VMware management suite: VMware View (which delivers personalized virtual desktops as a managed service) and VMware vCloud Director (which enables provisioning, deploying, and managing virtualized workloads in internal and external clouds). Moving forward, the Flex footprint expands into VMware's broad customer base with its next-generation management console for vSphere. VMware's 25,000-plus strong partner and customer ecosystems will soon be able to leverage Flex to integrate their solutions into the VMware management UIs. Join the VMWare team to hear about how they use Flex to improve VMware product experiences. 
 

VMware has released another great “technical paper” regarding Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1. It can be found in the Technical Resource Center which by the way contains a lot of awesome docs.

The technical paper, Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 4.1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.

Chapter 1 - “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.

Chapter 2 - “ESX and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESX™ software and the virtual machines that run in it.

Chapter 3 - “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.

Chapter 4 - “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding resource management best practices.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.1.pdf

 The HP Virtual Connect team is pleased to announce that HP Virtual Connect for Dummies® - 2nd  Edition is now available as an e-book, simply register and you will be taken to the download page:

 • What's new with Virtual Connect and all about the new Virtual Connect FlexFabric Module
 • How HP Virtual Connect simplifies your data center, lowers costs, and saves time
 • About the HP Virtual Connect product family

This book introduces the core concepts and technologies for HP Virtual Connect and uses information supplied by HP so you can get a good idea of how HP Virtual Connect lives up to its billing as the most complete and advanced server edge virtualization solution available. This book was written for HP. Consider this an easy reference tool that you can go back to whenever you need to learn more about what HP Virtual Connect is all about. Like any book in the For Dummies series, the information in this book is easily accessible so even when we start getting into technospeak (and some of that is inevitable) you won’t feel overwhelmed. And there aren’t any quizzes at the end of the chapters, so don’t feel pressured to remember anything you read in this book.

The Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) software implements an idea of a physical interconnection cable applied to Windows audio applications. Like traditional audio devices (CD Player, FM receiver, equalizer, amplifier etc.) are connected by the electric (analog or digital) cables, Windows audio applications can be connected together by the Virtual Cables created by the VAC.

VAC has a Windows WDM/KS virtual device driver that creates a set of virtual audio devices named Virtual Cables. Each cable has a pair of audio ports, input and output. These ports are internally connected within each cable so all digital audio data sent (played) to the output port by "source" application are implicitly transferred to the input port and can be retrieved (recorded) by another (destination) application.

A Virtual Cable is similar to an ordinary audio adapter (a sound card) with its input and output externally connected between each other. Since a real adapter usually has a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) and ADC (analog-to-digital converter) in its signal path, an unneeded double digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversions are performed in case of such connection. Only rare and/or expensive adapters have a digital input and output that can be connected to transfer a signal clearly. VAC does such transfer itself, without any additional audio hardware.

Each port of each Virtual Cable is multi-client, allowing multiple applications to open the port at the same time. In the WDM/KS terms, it means each cable pin can be instantiated several times. All sounds (audio streams) coming to the playback port are mixed together, and each client connected to the recording port will get an individual copy of a signal via its recording/capture stream. Mixing and distributing are performed on the cable basis only, different cables are completely independent from each other.

As a WDM/KS filter driver, VAC represents a lowest-level audio layer that can be effectively used by any upper-level layer (KS-aware applications, DirectSound and MME subsystems, ASIO wrappers and so on). A small utility, Audio Repeater, is included into the package to perform various useful tasks.